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Author Topic: Motorola StarMax PowerPC Mac clone for AmigaOS?  (Read 1756 times)

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Offline LoadWBTopic starter

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Motorola StarMax PowerPC Mac clone for AmigaOS?
« on: February 14, 2010, 12:14:55 AM »
A customer is retiring some machines and clearing out some old store, and it falls upon me to clean the hard drives and dispose of the systems (mainly testing and handing over to a guy who refurbishes them for needy families.)

But one system caught my eye right off.  A Motorola StarMax 180MHz PowerPC machine.  I immediately thought, I wonder if this would be viable for some PowerPC variant of AmigaOS, be it OS4 or MorphOS.  Any thoughts?
 

Offline LoadWBTopic starter

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Re: Motorola StarMax PowerPC Mac clone for AmigaOS?
« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2010, 12:51:25 AM »
Well, damn. It at least has to be better than these '030 Macs I have around here now. I can retire them to a collection.
 

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Re: Motorola StarMax PowerPC Mac clone for AmigaOS?
« Reply #2 on: February 14, 2010, 05:56:08 PM »
Quote from: TheMagicM;543064
who is going to do the port to it and why? how readily available is the used hardware?  what does it offer that current old PPC systems dont?

yea I think "Nah.." was the correct reply unfortunately.  Just support whats out there.


I was not considering a wholly new port for the device.  It is an Apple motherboard, and I considered that an Apple-capable port would simply need drivers.  Although, there is a massive difference between the PPC603 and the CPUs used for the MacMini, which I think is probably the target for an Apple-compatible port of OS4.

It was just a thought to toss around.  Like I said, at least this machine would best the other two 030 Macs I have here.  I have to support Mac every once in a while, though the requests for older than OS9 have dropped to about once every 18 months.  I would genuinely be surprised if I get another call at the next cycle.